Dave Grohl Reveals Hour-Long Drinking Session Before Each Show

Dave Grohl revealed the heavy drinking session he enjoys before going onstage every night with the Foo Fighters.

The frontman owned up to downing four beers and more than six shots in the hour leading up to stage time.

“Should I tell people how to do it?” he wondered after being asked about his pre-show ritual on KLOS-FM. “Not how to do it. How you do it,” drummer Taylor Hawkins replied, prompting Grohl to say, “Kids, stay in school, don’t do drugs.”

You can watch the interview below.

Grohl explained his ritual began with taking three Advil about 90 minutes ahead of the concert. “An hour before the gig, I have a Coors Light," he said. "About 50 minutes before the gig, I hit my first Jag [Jagermeister], finish the Coors Light, get another Coors Light going. Now there’s a bunch of people around, so I’m throwing shots at everybody and I’m taking shots with everyone in the room. The next Coors Light is down, I got a cold one. Now it’s about maybe 20 minutes before going on. I’ve had three or four shots of Jager and three Coors Lights. Then they sort of clear the room and we get 15 minutes to ourselves.”

He stopped and reflected, “This is bad! This is how I’ve spent every night of the last year and a half. That’s why I’m not scared of the Lord. I’ve seen worse.”

Then he continued: “So then like 15 minutes before, we’re like, ‘We need our privacy,’ which is such bullshit. We totally don’t. So then, it’s all of us and I feel guilty because I’m the only one who’s been doing the shots of the Jag, so I start feeding shots of Jag to the rest of the band, who are all drinking white wine and champagne and whatever. So I’m pounding them with Jag but I have to take them with them, so now I’m five or six shots in. And it’s like, it’s time to walk to the stage, so I crack another beer just to have a cold one as I walk up and I pick up the bottle and drink the last inch of the Jag!”

Elsewhere in the interview, Grohl recalled how Jimmy Eat World bassist Rick Burch became a whiskey distiller after experimenting with an ecologically friendly car. “He was trying to make biodiesel fuel," he said. "He was eventually like, ‘Screw this,’ and used the same equipment to make booze. … In his garage he starts distilling his own stuff; so, when we were making that [2011] record Wasting Light… he sends out a bottle of his own stuff.”

Grohl said the drink was “disgusting, like Southern Comfort on crack – thick, sweet, strong.” Later, when both bands were playing at the same festival, Burch presented him with another bottle, leading him to think, “Oh good.”

But he said “it was amazing." "We drank the whole bottle, had the best show ever, and then I went to him, ‘Dude, I need a case of this,’" Grohl recalled. "We actually built a rolling roadcase full of this dude’s bootleg hooch that he made in his garage with a biodiesel machine. … The drummer started puking blood, it got kinda weird, someone went blind. It was totally unsanctioned.”